My Fourth Time, We Drowned
Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route
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Beschreibung des Verlags
WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE
WINNER OF IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE
‘The most important work of contemporary reporting I have ever read’ SALLY ROONEY
The Western world has turned its back on refugees, fuelling one of the most devastating human rights disasters in history.
In August 2018, Sally Hayden received a Facebook message. ‘Hi sister Sally, we need your help,’ it read. ‘We are under bad condition in Libya prison. If you have time, I will tell you all the story.’ More messages followed from more refugees. They told stories of enslavement and trafficking, torture and murder, tuberculosis and sexual abuse. And they revealed something else: that they were all incarcerated as a direct result of European policy.
From there began a staggering investigation into the migrant crisis across North Africa. This book follows the shocking experiences of refugees seeking sanctuary, but it also surveys the bigger picture: the negligence of NGOs and corruption within the United Nations. The economics of the twenty-first-century slave trade and the EU’s bankrolling of Libyan militias. The trials of people smugglers, the frustrations of aid workers, the loopholes refugees seek out and the role of social media in crowdfunding ransoms. Who was accountable for the abuse? Where were the people finding solutions? Why wasn’t it being widely reported?
At its heart, this is a book about people who have made unimaginable choices, risking everything to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.
**This is Also a Love Story, the latest book from Sally Hayden is available to preorder now**
‘One of the most important testaments of this awful time in life's history’ EDNA O'BRIEN, author of The Little Red Chairs
‘A journalistic masterpiece … absolutely demands to be read’ MAX PORTER, author of Shy
‘Compassionate, brave, enraging … Hayden exposes the truth’ OLIVER BULLOUGH, author of Everybody Loves Our Dollars
About the author
Sally Hayden is an award-winning journalist and photographer focused on migration, conflict and humanitarian crises.
Her first book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned, won the 2022 Orwell Prize, Michel Deon Prize, Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the Irish Book Awards and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford.
She is currently the Africa correspondent for the Irish Times, and has also worked with VICE News, CNN International, the Financial Times, TIME, BBC, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, Channel 4 News, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera and Newsweek, among others.
A law graduate with an MSc in international politics, she has twice sat on the committee deciding the winner of Transparency International's Anti-Corruption Award. In 2019, she was included on the Forbes '30 Under 30' list of media in Europe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Hayden debuts with a harrowing look at the refugee crisis in Africa. Contacted in 2018 by an Eritrean migrant confined to the Ain Zara camp in Tripoli, Libya, Hayden soon realized that she "had stumbled, inadvertently, on a human rights disaster of epic proportions." In 2017, she explains, the EU began funding the Libyan coast guard's efforts to intercept migrant vessels in the Mediterranean and detain the passengers. Those "locked up without charge or trial, indefinitely," include Kaleb, an Eritrean teenager who traveled from Ethiopia to Sudan, then across 1,400 kilometers of the Sahara Desert to Libya, where he was held captive by smugglers for more than a year before making two failed attempts to cross the Mediterranean. Elsewhere, Haydendocuments torture and sexual abuse, women giving birth without medical care, and suicide by immolation. She also widens the lens to explore the repercussions of the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s and talks with refugees sent to camps in Rwanda, which still bears the scars of the 1994 genocide against ethnic Tutsis. A running thread is the inefficiency, and in some cases outright corruption, of international relief organizations including the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, whose staff members are alleged to have taken bribes in exchange for fast-tracking the resettlement process for asylum seekers. Intrepidly reported and vividly written, this sobering account shines a spotlight on an underreported tragedy.
